Friday, April 20, 2018

A Matter of Selection(Blog post #8)

         Throughout the Story of the seed the garden has experienced many changes and has accumulated many species of Brassica oleracea.  The plants have been growing very well from the start and they continue to even to the day.  The plants are related but they sure do have many differences.  The reason they are growing is because of variation.  The Leaves showed the most variation.  The leaves size ranged all the way from 7cm to 17cm.  The leaves don't just differ in size but also in shape and color.  In the pictures below, you can see how different the leaves shapes are from each other.  Some leaves are round and some are super jagged.  The colors ranged from dark green to light green to even some leaves with hints of purple in it.  The stems were very much different, the size between them was night and day.  In the pictures below, it shows the cabbage plant has a very short wide stem which held all the weight.  The collard greens stem was pretty short with a fairly medium/ average diameter.  Also, the Kale had a very tall stem, however, it was super skinny.  There were many variations between the Brassica oleraceas, with the common difference of height.
          Most forms of brassica oleracea are eaten by humans, so people used artificial selection to create certain phenotypes for the brassicas.  For example, maybe some people wanted to make some cabbage or another plant, so they used a strategy to get the larger trait from the plant.  Some different species possibly could have needed to adapt to a specific habitat or area which created descent with modification.  Selective breeding is very close but it happens naturally in nature and therefore creates better fit plants.  Every single trait that is being mentioned isn't just a quality that the organism has, but rather is part of the phenotypes.  The phenotypes are coded in the DNA by the genes in the chromosomes.  The phenotypes can be aquired in many ways.  For example: Mutations, selective breeding, artificial selection, adaptation, or even descent with modification.  You may think of mutations as harmful, but not all are harmful.  While all mutations change the phenotype, some do it for good and some don't harm at all.  An adaptation is a trait gained by a human/organism that makes them more fit for the specific environment that they live in.  Descent with modification is when an animal adapts and survives through natural selection and then reproduces and that organism has a brand new trait without doing any of the things listed above.  This can also happen if either of the parents have the new trait.
         The plants have at least one thing in common, the leaf color,  they are had some coloration of  green in it. They all had some green because all the brassica has green chloroplasts inside of the leaves.  When light shines on the leaves, it reflects green light, which makes us see the green.  This is because of the chlorophyll found in the thylakoid mebranes of the chloroplast.  This is why most plants are green and how we see them.


 
       Farmers and breeders will always want to sell bigger and better plants in order to make more money.  Most want their products to look as nice as they possibly can, appereance is everything.   By using plant modification, farmers can plant soy beans in an area with a lot of bugs, or even grapes in the dessert.  This way they can make the plants practically "perfect", by plant breeding or genetically modifying the seeds and to extract the desired trait.  To modify the seed the breeders take the gene and put a copy into the DNA of host plant cells.  Then when the plant is grown and mature it produces seeds.  Then the government can approve of the seeds and then they can be sold.

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